


Could

by flailingmuse



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 13:16:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9183316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flailingmuse/pseuds/flailingmuse
Summary: She looks at him, sometimes, and she thinks, I could love him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So I just started season 4 and I have Some Feelings about a certain captain and her first officer, so I wrote some of them down.

She looks at him, sometimes, and she thinks, _I could love him_. Her thoughts dance around the word, skittish at acknowledging the implications, at the facts of her feelings. She can't - won't –  deny that they exist. She’s past the foolish point of pretending such things. Her mind and her heart are compass and rudder and they have always steered her true in the end. The strength of her own self have carried her this far – out into the black beyond help or hope of rescue. Beyond advice and beyond reason, out here in the stars that slip by at a blur, the twinkling edge of a warp field carrying them minute by minute closer to a home that somehow never seems to grow nearer.

She looks at him, sometimes, and she thinks, _I could love him_ , but she won’t. And though they have come through hell and high water together, fought their way through Borg and bloodshed and he has become as much a part of her as her own right arm – she will not love him. She cannot. Because at the other end of the black there are familiar arms waiting, a loyal heart that she tells herself will not have given up on her, not yet, not after all this time lost. She will not betray it.

And yet. And yet her heart is splitting in two, phasing apart so that there are two Kathryn’s existing simultaneously. One who knows that _when_ they make it home there will be someone waiting for her. Someone who will not have abandoned her or given up hope, no matter what official records will have said by now. And the Other, who fears that they will never get home, that the shortcuts she hopes for will not exist, that by the time the Alpha quadrant is in sight they will all be old and grey and decrepit.  

That most of them will be dead.

It is that Kathryn, the one whose hopelessness she denies and denies and denies, that whispers so fiercely, _we could love him_. It is that Kathryn whose heart sighs and cracks just a little more each time his hand lingers at her shoulder, when his eyes dance and he smiles at her like a boy with a secret. She wonders if he can see her, the other Kathryn, when he looks at her.  If knows how close he’s come to drawing her out.

He could love her. Perhaps does already – she isn’t blind. She knows, or thinks she knows, all the ways that love can shine out from a person. She can tell friendship from respect from admiration from affection. She's no wide-eyed cadet, dizzy with the terror and glory of an impossible situation, clinging to whatever warmth the first sparks of a connection can bring. And at this point in her life she’s sure she can tell what kind of love is in a glance, a word, a touch.

She looks at him and thinks, _I could love him_. And from one day to the next she doesn't know if this will be the one where she gives in. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> P.S. I haven't actually finished watching the show all the way through yet, so please don't leave me any spoilers in the comments!


End file.
